Your soul resides in your stomach.

Last Sunday morning, I took my mom to the Dupont Circle farmer's market. Amid the splendiferous array greens like purslane and French sorrel and the tables full of locally-made saffron-scented sheepsmilk cheese, we found a table selling real, honest-to-god black raspberries. You see red raspberries all over the place. Every once in a while, even Trader Joe's carries golden raspberries. And I'm not talking about blackberries. Black raspberries are different -- something special.

Personally, I haven't seen any of those little purple guys since I was a very small kid. When I lived on the farm out in West Tennessee, we actually had all three varieties of raspberries in our garden. In truth, I had no idea that raspberries were a luxury until I noted that you pay $5 for a quarter-pint in most grocery stores. As a kid, I ate them by the fistful--such opulent gluttony!

So, when I put the first one in my mouth, the sense memory of the summers when I was 4, 5, 6... was so terribly intense that it pricked tears into my eyes. I'm not exaggerating. I was standing right there on 20th, willing tears away. Tears over a raspberry.

This is the kind of experience that, I'm pretty sure, is unique to the farmer's market milieu. Unique in an urban environment, anyway. My raspberry was organic, grown in neighboring state Pennsylvania and flawlessly mold-free. Probably, it had been picked yesterday--at the very earliest.

And then, feeling freshly virtuous from our locavore's shopping expedition, I took my mom to see the new documentary, Food, Inc. Now, since I began this blog, one of the recurring themes (besides my own narcissism and my desire to have a lot of sex, I mean) is my conviction that the American food supply has long since gone to hell, tipped out of its handbasket and danced around in its own fecal matter once it got there. How many eco-food films have I admonished you, fair readers, to go see? Milk in the Land, Flow, Fast-Food Nation ... I can't even remember all the others. It's not new news that my anxiety about what we all eat and how we choose our foods is ever ratcheting itself higher. And as a result, I feel as though it's not even possible for me to scream loud enough. Especially considering my readership is, you know, modest.

On a day-to-day basis, I am frustrated that I'm not making any headway with even my closest friends and family members. My own dad insists buying organic half-and-half is a waste of money. I had an argument just the other day with a friend who prioritizes saving money in the short term over the exorbitant costs to the planet, to underprivileged peoples, to conventionally raised animals and to our bodies that buying from mainstream corporate venues makes inevitable. And even the friends who I know buy the argument that sustainability, organics and locally grown foods are not just the best way to eat, but the only way to eat, will still swing over to the grungy local Safeway more often than they'll admit aloud to me.

I blame bottlenecks in the information flow. The information that is to be found in a movie like Food, Inc. is simply not available to those who don't pointedly seek it out. Most people haven't seen footage of a feedlot (and probably don't want to). Most people don't have the foggiest clue as to what the inside of a corn refinery looks like. Most people, in fact, hear of a salmonella outbreak caused by contaminated spinach and simply stop eating spinach. They don't understand that spinach should never be contaminated with an animal-borne bacteria, or that the only way spinach could possibly encounter salmonella would be for it to be grown in the path of run-off from a corporate chicken house.

Now, I could go into plenty of detail as to the ecological and dietary carnage that you'll see in this film. Feedlots look like Auschwitz for cows, people. Commericial chicken houses? Chickens, grown too fast and too fat to support their own body weights on their little chicken legs, teem in dusty clouds of dried fecal matter, squawking like banshees. The brevity of their miserable lives is almost a blessing. And corn. I can't even begin to address the giant clusterfuck that compose the corn-producing entities in this country. So, I'm not going to.

I will, however, take this moment to offer a plea: see this film. See all the other films I liked above. Read The Omnovore's Dilemma. Read Fast-Food Nation. Read anything Alice Waters ever wrote. Read Mark Bittman. Read Deborah Madison. And then learn how to eat anew. How to value quality, untainted food over cheap food. How to consider the longterm ramifications of every dollar you spend affect every other single solitary human with whom you currently share the planet -- and all those who'll come after you.

And consider this: in 1950, the average American spent 10% of his or her family's income on food. Today, the average American spends only 3% on food. And bitches constantly about the price of an anti-biotic-free, non-rBGH, organic jug of milk. If these statistics don't show us that our priorities are out of whack, I don't know what might.

So, in lieu of a full-on review (in hopes that my guilt trip and paucity of my characteristic spoilers will lead you to the theater), I offer three takeaways:

• Our mainstream food supply chain was designed by Heironymous Bosch. Everything we eat may as well be coated in petroleum, then shit, then money. That's not a metaphor. At least not the oil and shit parts.
• Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are the prophets of our age. If you're not listening to them, not reading them, not taking their wisdom to the bosom, you are tolling the death knell for middle class, comfortable American life as we know it. Clean the fucking cobwebs from your eyes. They know the light and are desperate to bring it to you.
• Activistic consumerism is the most viable, valuable, powerful tool for social change we've got. Engage your soul when you spend. If your money is going in the opposite direction of your personal code of ethics, you're either underinformed or a hypocrite. More than likely, you're the former. Fix that. Educate yourself about the companies from which you buy. Do they mistreat their work force? Do they raise sick animals that are bound to make your family sick as well? Are they contaminating the water tables with their putrid run-off? Will their practices make this planet uninhabitable in under two generations? If the answer to any of these question is yes, show them you don't believe in their practices by not buying their products. The demand for organic foodstuffs is growing by 20% every year. That's consumer, not corporate, power, folks. And 20% remarkably high number--one of which we should be proud. It's us--not the corporations--who control where we spend our money. We are in control of the food industry because if they aren't making products we'll buy, they'll start making ones we will. We're witnessing a sea change, my friends. On which side will you be when the tide comes in?

Because I mean to put my own efforts and money where my mouth is, I've renewed my commitment to the locavore life. Because it is my strongest of convictions that every person's individual sense of responsibility with regard to ethical consumerism is the very thing that need reach the proverbial critical mass in order to turn this heavy boat around, I mean to make a tangible adjustment in my own life. I'm putting it in print because I hope telling you, a handful of strangers I may never meet and a slightly bigger handful of friends and family members, of my resolution will help hold me accountable. And also... well, maybe because I secretly hope that I can motivate at least a handful of you into changing your buying habits alongside me. Ultimately, though, I can't, in good conscience, spend another dollar on food without considering the effect that dollar will have on the global community.

So here you go:

Every weekend, I'm gonna haul myself out of bed at a very early o'clock and buy as much of my weekly rations as I can at one farmer's market or another. DC is full of farmer's markets, with representatives mostly from farms all over Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The variety of products is certainly ample enough to support the most omnivorous diet. For any local readers, check out the DC Harvest blog (their tweets are plenty informative as well) for some great tips on what's good where. Everyone else? Your research is only a google away.

This morning, I went back to the Dupont Circle market. It was a glorious morning. Healthy farm boys handed out apricot samples. Pretty women pushed strollers or flicked ponytails. Everyone had on a maxi-dress. And I found grass-fed lamb summer sausage and beer-washed sheepsmilk cheese. I bought some pitch-perfect cucumber mint vodka gelato. The tomatoes--dear goddess, I would have sold my firstborn for those tomatoes. And apricots that boy handed me were flavorful like you just can't get, not even at Whole Foods. It's expensive to do this, no doubt. But I don't think I've ever felt so happy forking it over.

So, because all this puts me in a good mood, how about a recipe for a salad I just made up?

A Mid-Summer's Night's Salad

For the salad:
2 small fennel bulbs, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped (I found purple ones--gorgeous--but any color will do.)
3 small new carrots, chopped into rounds
1 luscious summer tomato, chopped
5 or 6 radishes, sliced
2 tbsp chopped fresh tarragon leaves

For the dressing:
1 1/2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
1 clove garlic, minced
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp cumin
cayenne pepper to taste

Pour the dressing over the salad and toss. This would probably serve up to 3 people, but I just ate the whole thing for dinner. It was a lot of vegetables, but it felt so virtuous (after all the sheep cheese I ate earlier) that I couldn't stop.

Bon appetite!